Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  Though my sister is far cleverer than I am in most ways, irony is frequently lost on her, particularly as it applies to having imprisoned your brother with silk magic only to then be perturbed at accusations of wrong-doing.

  ‘When Ferius and Reichis couldn’t breach the spells around the house, they went to the queen … No, wait.’ I nodded at Torian. ‘She went to you, didn’t she? Because Ferius wouldn’t be able to get in to see the queen in the middle of the night by herself.’

  ‘Reckon I could if I set my mind to it,’ Ferius said, sounding a little offended.

  ‘Yeah, but that would take too long. Torian doesn’t like you, but you knew she’d likely feel guilty over having suckered me into nearly getting executed by the Murmurers back in Darome.’

  ‘The who?’ Shalla asked.

  ‘And he wonders why we keep state secrets from mouthy card sharps,’ Torian said, but I could tell by the look in her face I was right.

  Good to know you’ve got a conscience in there somewhere, lieutenant.

  ‘You brought a detachment of marshals,’ I said, nodding to the men and women surrounding her. ‘Only you know enough about magic that I’m guessing at least one of them is a foreign mage disguised as a guard.’

  Faces turned towards the marshals’ entourage, no doubt trying to guess who the hidden mage was.

  ‘Somebody, please, shut him up,’ Torian swore.

  Ferius chuckled at that.

  ‘What purpose does this game serve, Argosi?’ Shalla asked.

  It was a fair question, but Ferius ignored her. ‘Go on, kid,’ she encouraged me. ‘You’re doin’ just fine.’

  ‘You decided you had to go get Queen Ginevra,’ I said. ‘You knew even my father wouldn’t dare refuse a foreign monarch searching for one of her royal tutors. It would be a diplomatic nightmare.’ I glanced over at Torian, who turned away. ‘The lieutenant refused at first. She’d never let the queen walk into a dangerous situation like this. I imagine she had her marshals surround you.’ I took them in properly for the first time, and saw more than a couple of bruises blooming around their faces and cuts on their hands that looked a lot like the kind you get when a razor-sharp steel card hits you.

  A slow rumbling on my chest told me Reichis was getting irritated.

  ‘So you distracted the marshals while Reichis slipped past them to get to the queen.’

  ‘Finally,’ the squirrel cat growled. ‘I did save your life, you know.’

  ‘This is all nonsense,’ my sister declared. Her gaze kept going to my father.

  She doesn’t want him embarrassed like this in public, I thought. Tough luck, sister.

  ‘Ke’heops granted the queen entry, of course, though I suppose that means he’d already done what he came to do.’

  ‘What is the point of all this?’ Shalla demanded. ‘If he wants to know wh—’

  ‘He ain’t the one who needs to know, girl,’ Ferius said. ‘You do. You all do.’

  Queen Ginevra stepped forward. ‘Forgive me, Path of the Wild Daisy, but I too am somewhat confounded by this … demonstration.’

  Reflexively, Ferius reached into her waistcoat for a smoking reed, only to come away disappointed. ‘Like bein’ stranded in the desert without a drop of water.’ She turned her attention back to the others. ‘All of you have been pushin’ the kid here to go do your dirty work, out there in the Berabesq lands where your worst fears are coming true. But you act like he’s an arrow you can just aim and fire and wait to see what damage it does to your enemies. That ain’t the Argosi way. It ain’t Kellen’s way.’

  ‘Great,’ Torian muttered. ‘Another speech about the Argosi.’

  Reichis giggled at that.

  Ferius ignored them both. ‘The boy ain’t like all o’ you. Ain’t like me neither. But we’re all gonna have to trust him when the time comes. Just reckoned it might help for you to see that he ain’t half as dumb as he seems, which makes him twice as smart as you lot.’

  I was still trying to figure out whether she’d just insulted me, complimented me, insulted everyone else in the room or actually said nothing at all. Some puzzles even arta precis can’t solve.

  I started to scratch at my right arm, which I now realised was stinging like seven devils. When my parents had counter-banded me, Reichis had rescued me before they could destroy my breath band. It had been my last connection to the magic of my people, and now …

  Ferius pressed a hand down on my shoulder, preventing me from raising my forearm to see what had been done to it. ‘We don’t get to decide our fates,’ she said quietly. ‘Only what meaning we give them.’

  It was a warning of sorts. But I already knew the answer. Despite all the incredible things Ferius had taught me, magic still mattered to me a great deal. I raised up my right arm, turning it this way and that to find the source of the stinging.

  My breath band was intact. No counter-sigils had been inscribed to block my access to the magic of air, of communication and the guiding of forces. The Jan’Tep consider breath the weakest and least useful form of magic, but I’d come to adore it in its way. While it could do little on its own, breath, when combined with other things could be useful. Surprising. A trickster’s magic.

  Ancestors, thank you.

  I had just started to breathe a sigh of relief when I noticed something odd on the back of my forearm below the breath band. A small, complex configuration of tattooed copper lines wound inside one of the ugly counter-sigils that had destroyed my ember band. There was a kind of bizarre, twisted geometry about the way these new copper lines interacted with the counter-sigils and the original ones beneath. I kept trying to find the beginnings and endings of lines but the longer I looked, the more confused I became.

  ‘Do not stare at it too long,’ Ke’heops warned. ‘It can be dangerous to the mind.’

  But why would he have needed to inscribe new forms to reinforce the counter-sigils? Unless …

  ‘You … You didn’t bring me here to counter-band me?’ I asked.

  When my father didn’t reply, I forced hopefulness back down. Hope, like despair, only pollutes will, and what I needed right now was a great deal of will.

  I sent the first, tentative urgings into my ember band. In the past when I’d tried this, a sickening nausea would overtake me. The harder I pushed, the worse it became, until finally blood would spill from my nose and I would pass out from the pain.

  Now, though, something was different. The nausea was still there, but it was weaker … Incomplete somehow. I pushed more and more of my strength into the ember band, willing it to spark.

  ‘Don’t drive yourself too hard,’ Shalla warned. ‘Your will has never been all that—’

  ‘Silence, daughter,’ Ke’heops said, watching me closely from the end of the table.

  Sweat dripped into my eyes, blinding me. I ignored the discomfort, ignored the crowd of people watching me, ignored everything but the copper-coloured sigils on my ember band.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, I felt a tingle, like the metallic ink in the tattoos was shifting between icy cold and burning hot, back and forth. The tiniest, briefest flicker of orange-red light shimmered across the one sigil where my father had inscribed over the counter-banding.

  I shaped my right hand into the somatic form for the simplest ember spell I’d learned as an initiate – a cantrip really. With any luck, it would ignite a flicker of flame at the end of my fingertip. ‘Ure’feres,’ I intoned.

  The new sigil of my ember band sparked for an instant, then faded back to a flat, lifeless copper colour.

  ‘I have only corrected the first sigil,’ my father said, taking a step closer. ‘It will take much time to repair the others, but it is a start.’ He looked down on me with a weary smile that spoke of a kind of pride I hadn’t seen in him before. ‘It is a good start.’

  Then my father collapsed on top of me.

  25

  The Price

  Strange as it sounds, my first thought was that this was the closest I�
��d been to my father since before I’d left home. I’m not talking about him poking me with needles dripping with molten-hot metallic inks or casting spells on me, but the simple warmth of one person’s skin touching that of another.

  I wondered if perhaps he was dead.

  ‘Everyone out!’ Sha’maat said.

  ‘We could summon the court physicians,’ one of the queen’s attendants began.

  Raw magic billowed around my sister with a rage that terrified even me. Queen Ginevra, ever protective of her subjects but not entirely of sound mind, stepped in front of the others. ‘That will suffice, Sha’maat of the House of Ke.’

  My sister’s eyes flashed with something more than just irritation at this twelve-year-old girl – monarch or not – defying her. Some part of her knew she could kill everyone in that room with a thought. I’m pretty sure some part of her wanted to.

  ‘Don’t,’ Ferius said quietly, her hand on my shoulder. My hands had drifted into the powder holsters at my side. ‘You’re gonna have to trust her one day, kid.’

  An odd thing to say. Of course I trusted my sister – almost as far as I could throw her.

  The raging fires of Sha’maat’s magic settled themselves, first into a pulsating glow of shifting colours, then finally containing themselves once more within the six sparking bands around her forearms, shimmering with the promise of violence should they be awakened once more.

  ‘We will leave you now,’ the queen said, signalling for the athenaeum to clear. ‘Should you require any assistance—’

  ‘We won’t,’ Sha’maat said.

  The queen nodded as she left. ‘As you say.’

  Ferius gave my arm a final squeeze, then picked up Reichis and placed him on her shoulder. I’d kind of wondered why the squirrel cat had remained silent throughout Shalla’s mystical tantrum. Now I saw all his fur sticking straight out as if he’d been caught up in the static charge of a lightning storm.

  ‘Crazy Jan’Tep skinbag,’ he muttered, then added, ‘Of all the times for her to not put me to sleep …’

  The crowded chamber emptied out, leaving only myself, my father and Sha’maat.

  ‘Help me get him to his room,’ she commanded.

  I was still weak from the effects of the banding so it took all my strength just to roll my father off my legs. I had to sit there a while before Shalla and I were able to support his weight between us up to one of the nearby guest rooms. Tall and broad-shouldered, muscled like a soldier, carrying him was like hauling a slab of stone.

  ‘Why not simply use iron magic to make him float?’ I asked her.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  That was becoming a frequent refrain from my sister. The pinched skin at the corners of her eyes, the slight tremble of her jaw when she’d admonished me, those gave the answer.

  She can’t focus enough to cast a spell properly, I realised. That show of magic she’d made before the others had been posturing, the growling of a cornered animal. She could summon all the magic she wanted, but in her panicked state she couldn’t have cast so much as an initiate’s cantrip properly.

  Useful information to know for the future.

  A petty thought? Maybe, but people have been trying to kill me for pettier reasons lately.

  ‘Lay him on the bed,’ she instructed.

  We settled him down on the mattress and stretched him out. Sha’maat began murmuring incantations longer and more complex than any I’d learned in all my years as an initiate. The bands for blood and silk on her forearms ignited sporadically at first, sputtering with red and purple sparks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer – just kept up the steady, uncommonly long incantation, the fingers of her right hand shifting through dozens of somatic forms I didn’t recognise.

  Colour began to return to our father’s face, and his stern features settled into a kind of peacefulness.

  ‘We must give him time to recover,’ she said, and bade me follow her out of the room.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked once we were back in the central foyer of her chambers. ‘Is it a … malediction like Mother’s?’

  Shalla gave a short, sharp and very bitter laugh. ‘A kind of malediction, I suppose.’ Her gaze as she stared at me was damning. ‘Do you have any conception of the raw magical force it takes to interweave new pathways within a counter-banded sigil? The unimaginable, maddening complexity of the esoteric geometries that must be envisioned?’

  I didn’t. So far as I knew, no one else did either.

  Every Jan’Tep initiate knows you can’t unwind a counter-banding. No spellmaster has ever written of any discoveries that could make it possible, and believe me, I’ve looked. In the nearly three years since I’d left my home, in between searching for cures for the shadowblack, I’d hunted for any hint of a way to restore my connection to the raw magical forces of iron, ember, silk, sand and blood.

  I raised up my forearm and stared at the one restored sigil on my ember band. ‘How did he do it?’

  ‘It was Mother,’ Sha’maat replied, barely holding back tears.

  ‘Mother?’

  She nodded. ‘Ever since the day you walked out on us, she searched for ways to undo the counter-banding, to give you a reason to come home. Father too. Even as he fought his own battles against those who sought to keep him from becoming mage sovereign, he worked tirelessly with Mother to find a way to restore your bands.’

  I had trouble imagining my father and mother sitting there in her study, exchanging theories, frantically scribbling down formulae and designs of new sigils, all the while reminding each other how terribly important it was to bring weak, disloyal Kellen back into their loving embrace.

  ‘They fought, Kellen,’ my sister said as she saw the dubiousness in my expression. ‘Not just against our enemies, not just against the problem of your bands, but with each other. Night and day, sometimes weeks at a time. Resentment built up between them, both blaming the other for failing to find a way to make you whole.’

  Make me whole. I felt my own stab of resentment at that. I wanted to tell her that I was fine as I was. I was Kellen Argos, the Path of Endless Stars. An outlaw who’d survived dozens of duels. I was the queen’s spellslinger. I didn’t need or want to ever be Jan’Tep again.

  Only … I did.

  My eyes went to the bands on my forearms, so ugly and distorted from the counter-sigils, all except my breath band and that one beautiful copper sigil on the ember band. Even after all this time, some part of me yearned to be a true mage. Like my mother. Like my father.

  ‘What happens now?’ I asked.

  My sister nodded as if we’d made some kind of bargain. ‘The process will be long and difficult. Each counter-sigil takes a great deal of time and power to unwind.’ She took hold of my wrist and held up my forearm. ‘It’s taken nearly two years to find the solution just for this one sigil.’

  Two years. There were nine sigils on the ember band. Sixteen on silk. The band for blood magic had twenty-seven separate sigils. I’d be a doddering old man long before I could become a true mage.

  ‘The first one will have been the hardest,’ she said, seeing my deflation. ‘We couldn’t even be sure it was possible.’ She let go of my hand and wrapped her arms around me. ‘But now that we know the method works, brother, with all of us working together, once you’ve dealt with the threat of the Berabesq god and returned home …’

  There was that word again. Home.

  She must’ve seen something in my expression. Shalla’s always known me better than anyone else. Only she’s never quite understood me. She opened her mouth – no doubt to berate me as always about family and duty, but then stopped. A weariness seemed to overcome her as she shook her head like an old woman with a palsy. ‘I just don’t know, Kellen,’ she said at last.

  ‘You don’t know what?’

  Again she hesitated. ‘I … I don’t know what to do about you. I keep thinking there’s something I could
say, some gift I could give you or some action I could take that would bring you back. Something that would make you stop hating us.’

  Somehow those words cut me deeper than any rebuke.

  ‘I don’t hate you, sister,’ I said, reaching for her hand. ‘I love you.’

  Her eyes met mine, and a kind of sorrowful smirk appeared at the corners of her mouth. ‘You love me. And you hate me. Sometimes I’m your beloved sister, other times your reviled nemesis. You go back and forth so often and so quickly I sometimes wonder if even you know what you feel.’

  With a gesture of her hand, the door of the athenaeum opened, signalling I was being dismissed.

  As I turned to go, I heard a sob as Sha’maat said, ‘I’m not sure how much more of it I can take, brother.’

  26

  The Enigmatist

  I found Ferius waiting for me outside. Somehow, in a city where such things are unheard of, she’d managed to find a smoking reed. She looked remarkably pleased with herself.

  ‘Where’s Reichis?’ I asked.

  She held up the reed, the smouldering end a dot of red light against the backdrop of night. ‘Doesn’t appreciate the finer things. Said he had some huntin’ to do, though I expect it involves pastries and liqueurs more than rabbits.’

  We set off down the street. It was a long walk back to the palace, which was why even she couldn’t hide that something was wrong.

  ‘That leg of yours is hurting worse than you’re letting on,’ I said.

  ‘What, this?’ she asked, slapping it with her hand and doing a piss-poor job of not wincing. ‘You tellin’ me you’ve never taken a crossbow bolt in the leg?’

  Notice that she didn’t say she had taken a crossbow bolt.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked, pointing the burning end of her reed at the ember sigil on my forearm. ‘That had to sting somethin’ fierce.’ She chuckled then. ‘Mind you, probably no more than havin’ your pappy tell you off like I imagine he did. You make peace with your sister before you left?’

  ‘Ferius …’

  ‘Family’s important to you, kid, no matter how hard you try to—’